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Fixed: Universal USB Installer syslinux errors

I was trying to create a bootable flash drive with Ubuntu 11.04 using the Universal USB Installer 1.8.6.3 utility from pendrivelinx.com on a Windows 7 64-bit machine with a 16 GB flash drive (mapped to G:), but I kept getting an error that the drive wouldn’t be bootable.

When I opened a command prompt and ran syslinuxnew.exe -maf G:, the result was zero FAT sectors. When I ran syslinux.exe -maf G:, I got a much more informative message, or at least one that I could better understand: this doesn’t look like a valid FAT filesystem.

And of course, the flash drive wasn’t FAT32, it was NTFS. I had forgotten to format the drive as FAT32 before running the utility, but I also managed to not check the box next to “We will format G:\Drive as FAT32.” in the utility itself.

No wonder Google wasn’t returning any results when I searched this – who’s going to have missed properly formatting the drive not once but twice?

I had this issue, and it wasn’t a formatting problem (although thank you for the tip), but rather that the amount of space I specified to “Store Changes” needed to be at least 2048MB (2GB). It was an 8GB flash drive, so this was no problem. The reason it needs 2GB of space is that is the minimum amount of space required to house an Ubuntu system volume. If I had opted out of retaining changes, I probably wouldn’t have even encountered this trouble, but I wanted to experiment with a portable, updateable Ubuntu install.

> No wonder Google wasn’t returning any results when I searched this – who’s going to have missed properly formatting the drive twice?

Well, I did it too :). Actually, my drive came pre-formatted as FAT32, but after re-formatting (not quick format) as FAT32 from Windows Explorer, I no longer get this error. Thanks for taking the time to post this!

Thanks for the info Oliver. Was trying to put Puppy Slacko on a USB stick using Universal USB Installer and kept getting “syslinuxnew.exe has stopped working” and “USB won’t be bootable” error message.
Your fix worked a treat.
Interesting that a quick format doesn’t work in this case though.
You learn something new every day eh?

I’m trying to create a bootable usb with Universal USB Installer to install Ubuntu 13.04 amd 64… I formated the USB like five times, not quick format. The USB is completely empty, but when I try to create the Bootable USB, it tells me that there’s no space. The USB is 8 GB, is in good condition, I can use it for whatever I want, but this. Oh, I’m doing it form windows 7. Please, help.